Captcha Catches Crap

Akismet does a fine job.  In Amazing Akismet SPAM Fighting, I explained that with a simple WordPress plugin, I was saved from significant comment moderation from our fiends friends, the spammers.  Since that post, I’ve avoided thousands of SPAM hits, thanks to Akismet.

But that still requires an occasional review of the SPAM folder to 1) make sure there aren’t any false positives (and there really aren’t many!), and 2) to just clean it out.

Spammers (and their ‘bots) are relentless, so I decided to add another line of defense: CAPTCHA.

Wikipedia defines CAPTCHA as “a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer.” Man, that is what we need to fight SPAM!

With CAPTCHA displays random characters in an odd, graphical manner, that prevents Internet ‘bots from reading them.  Humans can easily discern the characters, enter them into the box and continue.  In this case, allow a blog comment to be entered.

The term CAPTCHA means ”Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Follow the wiki link above for more about the science behind the magic.

There are many CAPTCHA plugins available for WordPress.  The I chose is SI CAPTCHA for WordPress.  I like the colors.  :-)

With this new defensive maneuver against SPAM, it comes with a thank you to all of The Ultimate Blogging Toolkit readers.  It does force you to enter a few extra characters to enter a comment, but it saves me considerable non-value added time.  I appreciate your indulgence.

Dave

Akismet Rocks!

When I originally installed the Akismet plug-in to my WordPress blog, I posted an early set of stats on its SPAM filtering success.  After several weeks of blocking the foul SPAM, I am pleased to provide a quick update.

With over 700 SPAM messages caught, Akismet is working at an astonishing 99+% accuracy!  The very, very few messages I have to deal with is a breeze considering the dozens a day I used to delete.

Why am I sharing this with you?  My hope is that due to continued excellent SPAM fighting with a simple tool like Akismet, I’m hoping WordPress will eventually be configured with an option to turn off the NO FOLLOW process. The NO FOLLOW approach to reducing SPAM is outdated and needs to go away.

Dave

Akismet Doing the Job

As part of my recent DoFollow sojourn, I discovered an excellent spam fighting tool already contained in WordPress: Akismet.  This was an excellent discovery, since my spam cleanup activities were loosing the battle – badly.

As a simple plug-in, it installed easily and only took a step to activate.

 WordPress.com provides users with an API key that allows the Akismet activation.  Since this is your control device for fighting spam, treat it as you would any other closely-guarded password.

As you can see, in the three days since I installed mine, Akismet has caught 75 (33/13/29) spam attempts successfully!  To put this into perspective, I was previously deleting individual spam comments  as a part of my moderation process.  Big time saver.  As important to catching the spam, Akismet did this with 100% accuracy.  This means that each catch was accurate.  In my review, I did not find any caught erroneously, nor were any missed.  Wow!

If you find Akismet misses one, or if it wrongfully flags an entry, not to worry.  Mark it as spam on the Dashboard or approve it, and Akismet learns from the process!

Between DoFollow and Akismet, I feel I have tremendously improved the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit – all in the last few days!

Dave